I wake up without one eye. It is not just the absence of an eye, though. There is also just nothing there. It is a perfectly round hole. I look in the mirror and, with the eye that’s still there, I can see some gray gelatin wiggling around inside the hole. It is dark like my room when I forget to pay the light bill.
There’s no fluid to hold it up, so it’s just squirming against my sinuses, pushing my throat down a bit. It doesn’t weigh much. It is so soft. I want to poke it but I’m too nervous.
I hear the sound of police entering my home. I know that it’s the police because I have a sixth sense about these kinds of things. I am especially sure because when they enter the home, I hear a loud crash and many, many voices say “It’s the police!”
They come to the door of my bedroom and look around. “Is this place booby trapped?” A fat guy asks me that. He’s not even wearing a uniform. He has at least six chins, as far as I know, and there is guacamole oozing out of his mouth. He wears a belt with a Bullet Bill Buckle. He’s wearing a Bart Simpson shirt that says Yo Quiero Taco Bell on it. I don’t remember that part.
“Calm down, sir,” says a real officer. He is dressed in a green shirt and green pants and has a ghillie suit on over that. He wears big buttons on the front of his ghillie suit that are pretty much obscured by the cascade of vinyl vines and leaves. I can barely see his shirt. Why even wear green? Why not wear white? Is he afraid of the acids in his armpit sweat staining his sleeves with the yellow of dehydrated urine?
“There is a hole in your head. We’re going to have to take you downtown.”
I am stammering. I put my sleeping foot over the side of my bed and the bones in my toe crunch up against the floor. I can’t feel it now but I know that I will when the foot wakes up. I will howl. I will cry. A torrent of tangy tears will trickle from that gaping hole on the left side of my face.
“I din’ dun’ know who dun did this one.” I am not a country boy. I am possessed. Then whatever possessed me leaves. It was short. It didn’t like what it saw, I’m sure. I don’t even like possessing myself.
“Please don’t take me downtown. Too many homeless people. One of them, just the other day, smiled at me. I told him to fuck off.”
But they took me downtown anyway. They tied me to a light pole. They said, “Stay here while we go find some help.” A homeless guy fell asleep at my feet and I slept too and I woke up with two holes in my head. I can still see. I guess eyes were a joke all along.